Novels about loss usually emphasize plot. But in Zsuzsa Bank’s outstanding debut novel, “The Swimmer” (Harcourt,288 pages,$23), the feeling of loss manifests itself as a sense of being outside of time. As her narrator, Kata, sums it up, “It didn’t even bother us anymore to see how slowly our lives were passing.” It was “as if someone had dropped Isti and me into syrup and then forgotten us.”

Isti is Kata’s peculiar little brother; together they follow their father on an aimless odyssey through Cold War Hungary, while their absentee mother lives as a refugee, then a factory worker, in the West. Ms. Bank’s novel, beautifully translated from the German, is made of many small, separated paragraphs; it is narration-by-postcard, or a treatment for a never-ending film made from photographs by Cartier-Bresson.

Each paragraph is told in Kata’s reserved voice, a species of the child made wise by tragedy. She never tries to explain her parents’ lost love; she lets the pictures do the talking. Her father refuses to part with a picture of his lost wife:

He would lie on the kitchen bench holding it, staring up at the ceiling and smoking. At times like this he wouldn’t hear the noisy barking of the dog at his side. He would look at my brother Isti and me as if we were strangers.We called it diving. Father has gone diving. We’d ask each other, Has Father come back from diving?

Kata and Isti cope with their life – as orphans, emotionally, since their father has abdicated – in different ways. Isti takes comfort in animals and the wild. He keeps enough pennies to buy some fish; when his father finds them, he cuts off their heads.

Their father’s severity can only be partly explained by poverty. He connects with his children only when the extremities of their personalities can converge. In one of the several idylls that dominate the novel, they stop at a cousin’s vineyard on the lake. Their father teaches them to swim: “he grabbed us, threw us into the lake, and called out, ‘Swim.'”

Swimming, the exercise in staying afloat, is the perfect motif for Ms. Bank’s unassertive storytelling. Her episodic paragraphs have a summary quality, which might rob her crisply drawn scenes of all momentum if she were attempting a forward-moving plot at all. But she sets things up on a sideways vector: Each chapter finds Isti and Kata passing time in some new way, and Ms. Bank welds these pastimes to the children’s emotional life with great integrity.

When they are staying with their paternal grandmother, they suffer her command to begin every sentence with “excuse me”: “‘Excuse us, we’ve twisted our necks,’ and we would tilt our heads to the side and walk in circles around the room, around the kitchen table, across the yard to the barn and back again, till Anna said to my father, ‘Your children are crazy; you’ve got crazy children.'”

After many years, a cousin runs away like Kata’s mother did, and his mother begins scratching herself: “We could hear her scratching her legs in front of the little altar that she never left anymore.” Such consequences, seemingly petty but so very real, are Ms. Bank’s subject. She recalls the brooding magic of Serbian Danilo Kis, or even the sunny creepiness of Gunter Grass. “The Swimmer,” if overlong and glancingly precious, introduces a potentially great voice in world literature.

***

Dean Bakopoulos tells an analogous but very different tale, set in Detroit. “Please don’t come back from the moon” (Harcourt, 288 pages, $23) imagines a generation of working-class dads who suddenly, simultaneously disappear. Afterward, their sons decide that their fathers have literally gone to the moon.

Mikey and his friend Nick grow up fast after their fathers leave, usurping the barstools at the Black Lantern and generally becoming petty criminals in a naturalistic neighborhood. There is an element of naive – or brazen – sentiment to Mr. Bakopoulos’s writing; in the preface, he writes that “I wanted the book, at times, to feel like a strange, melodic weeping had taken over the narrative.”

Mr. Bakopoulos’s frank bathos – “Perhaps we had dreams. To be honest, we couldn’t remember them” – has infelicitous moments. But Mr. Bakopoulos compensates with spirited, sketchy storytelling.

Behind Mr. Bakopoulos’s sociology is a subtle scheme of rising and cresting hope. His situations always articulate “the way the world felt.” Mikey suddenly starts reading good books, but then goes back to the bar for a few years. The shifting lines between worlds – upwardly mobile versus patriotically sessile – runs through “please don’t come back from the moon.” The first-person plural appears often, generating a unified voice of the neighborhood, similar to that of Jeffrey Eugenides’s “The Virgin Suicides” – set, incidentally, just a few miles away.